Why Don't American Cities Burn?. Michael B. Katz

side of the question “What is an American city?”

      Figure 1 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 1970.

      Figure 2 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 2000.

      Figure 3 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 1970.

      Figure 4 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 2000.

      Figure 5 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 1970.

      Figure 6 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 2000.

      Figure 7 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 1970.

      Figure 8 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 2000.

      Racial segregation also transformed urban space. Racial segregation was much higher in late than in early twentieth-century American cities. In 1930, the average African American lived in a neighborhood that was 31.7 percent black; by 1970, the percentage had jumped to 73.5. These were numbers never before experienced by any group, including the immigrants who poured into the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton described the situation, without exaggeration, as “American apartheid.” Affluent as well as poor African Americans experienced extreme racial segregation. In northern metropolitan areas in 1980, Massey and Denton revealed, measures of segregation for African Americans with incomes of $50,000 remained as high as for those with incomes of $2,500. In sixteen metropolitan areas, one of three African Americans lived in conditions of such high segregation that Massey and Denton labeled them “hypersegregation.”³⁷

      In the 1990s, although segregation in cities declined by an average of 5.5 percentage points, the average African American still lived in a census tract that was 51 percent black, while affluent African Americans were more likely to live near African Americans with modest incomes than near comparably well-off whites, and as Shorty’s neighborhood underlined, many thousands of African Americans still lived in districts marked by the toxic combination of poverty and segregation.³⁸ Nonetheless, in the last third of the twentieth century, Massey and his colleagues show, a “new regime of residential segregation” began to emerge. Despite mass immigration from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, overall levels of ethnic segregation did not rise. Measures of immigrant segregation remained “low to moderate” while, after 1970, “black segregation declined.” As racial segregation lessened, “socioeconomic segregation rose, as indicated by rising levels of dissimilarity between the poor and the affluent and between the college educated and high school graduates, yielding spatial isolation among people at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic scale.”³⁹

      Geography reflected income. After the mid-1970s, income and wealth inequality, as Chapter 2 explains in more detail, increased to levels not experienced for perhaps a century, and real wages declined despite rising productivity. “The fundamental reality,” write urban scholars Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, “is one of growing economic segregation in the context of overall rising inequality. People of different income classes are moving away from each other not just in how much income they have but also in where they live. America is breaking down into economically homogeneous enclaves.” Growing economic as well as racial inequality registered on urban space as economic segregation among whites grew notably after the 1970s. Growing economic inequality marked suburbs as well as cities as inner-ring and older suburbs experienced the poverty, population decline, job loss, and infrastructure decay usually associated with inner cities. In the early twenty- first century, as many poor people lived in suburbs as in cities.⁴⁰

      In the decades after World War II, urban redevelopment also transformed city space as urban renewal displaced poor residents, usually without relocating them to alternate housing, and cleared downtown land for reuse as offices, retail sites, and homes for the affluent. Urban renewal resulted from the federal 1949 Housing Act, which authorized city governments to assemble large tracts of land by taking properties through eminent domain and selling them cheaply to developers. Its “goal was to revive downtown business districts by razing the slums, bringing new businesses into the core, and attracting middle-class residents back to the city.” To rehouse families displaced by urban renewal, the 1949 law authorized 810,000 units of public housing. By 1960, only 320,000 had been built. This public housing, by and large, remained confined to segregated districts and never matched existing needs. “Between 1956 and 1972,” observe Peter Dreier and his colleagues, “urban renewal and urban freeway construction displaced an estimated 3.8 million persons from their homes,” rehousing only a small fraction. Urban renewal, they continue, “certainly changed the skyline of some big cities by subsidizing the construction of large office buildings that housed corporate headquarters, law firms, and other corporate activity.” But it did so at a price, destroying far more “low-cost housing than it built,” while doing little “to stem the movement of people and businesses to the suburbs or to improve the economic and living conditions of inner-city neighborhoods. On the contrary, it destabilized many of them promoting chaotic racial transition and flight.”⁴¹

      Destabilized cities marked by high concentrations of poverty and declining job opportunities for low-skilled workers proved fertile grounds for crime. By the late 1970s, the fear of collective violence aroused by the civil disturbances that began in the 1960s (discussed in Chapter 3) largely had given way to fears of murder, assault, and robbery reinforced by the outbreak of crack cocaine use in the 1980s, while within the segregated, impoverished cores of old cities, gangs fought each other, and black men like Herbert and Shorty killed each other (and, too often, innocent bystanders) in horrifying numbers. The number of violent crimes per 100,000 population, as reported by the FBI, rose from 160.9 in 1960 to 363.5 in 1970, 596.6 in 1980, and 729.6 in 1990 before reversing direction, declining to 506.5 in 2000 and 457.5 in 2008.⁴² Although actual crime rates declined in the 1990s, crime continued to preoccupy city residents and dominate the image of city centers. After September 11, 2001, fear of terror also stoked anxieties about urban safety. One result was a preoccupation with security that transformed urban landscapes. “Fortress L.A.” is the title of one chapter in Mike Davis’s powerful dystopian analysis of Los Angeles, City of Quartz. “Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles,” he writes, “where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous ‘armed response.’ This obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become the zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s.” One “universal and ineluctable consequence of this crusade to secure